The ability to communicate is important, whether it be for social, business, military, or other purposes. To address this need, a multitude of instant-messaging platforms have been developed to allow near-instant communication among users over a network, allowing users to communicate by exchanging text messages.
While they offer speedy communication, current instant messaging applications are user-centric by design. These systems permit individual users to communicate with each other, but do not provide a clean methodology for automated data sources to utilize the instant-messaging network. For example, several prior art instant messaging systems support person-to-person video conferencing that must be actively initiated by a user with a camera device. These prior art systems do not easily allow users to collaborate with each other around an automatically-shared video source
Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and apparatus for sharing and collaborating around a video source.